Monday, July 11, 2016

The Police Are A Domestic Military Force That No Longer Simply Serves And Protects

Like many people, I was enraged and glued to the television
for several days watching thousands of people across the country peacefully
protest the lynchings of two black men by police officers – Alton Sterling and Philando
Castile.

I was shocked and disheartened to hear that a mentally
disturbed shooter, filled with anger and hatred of white police officers, army
reservist Micah Xavier Johnson, opened fire on police at a peaceful
demonstration under the banner of Black Lives Matter in Dallas, Texas.

My jaw dropped and I yelled out loud “what the fuck,” when I
heard the chief of the Dallas police department describe at a press conference
how negotiations with a pinned down Johnson in a garage where going no where
and in order to put no other officers or civilians in harms way that they had decided
to use a C-4 plastic explosive attached to a robot to kill the suspect in the
Dallas ambush.

The police chief, David Brown, somberly described it as
their “robot bomb.”

I immediately thought about the first time I ever heard
about the police using a bomb in an American city. That was 30 years ago when
the Philadelphia police dropped an incendiary device on a bunker on the top of
a fortified compound from a helicopter during a standoff in West Philadelphia
between the police and an outcast black separatist group named MOVE.

Early in the morning on May 13, 1985, Philadelphia police
commissioner, Bregore Sambor, yelled into his megaphone, "Attention, MOVE
… this is America, … you have to abide by the laws of the United States."

Shortly after someone in the MOVE compound fired a weapon, the
police responded with an estimated 10,000 rounds of ammunition over the next
hour-and-a-half. Later that day, the city’s firs black mayor, Wilson Goode gave
the go ahead to drop a bomb on the roof to destroy the bunker.

When the dust finally settled, 61 houses had burned, 250
people were homeless, and 11 people were dead, including 5 children. Only two
people made it out of the MOVE house alive – a woman named Romona Africa and a
child named Birdie Africa.

With little public debate, the police have slowly transformed
themselves into a domestic military force – with what appears to be all the
powers and protections of the regular military – and American cities populated
by black and brown people have become urban war zones.

How did this happen?

Following a decade of "rights" movements (especially
black and Chicano liberation movements), urban rebellions in hundreds of
cities, and an increase in casual drug use by the baby boomer generation, the
nation's policy makers (with popular support from the public especially those
that fled the cities for the suburbs) declared wars on drugs, crime, and
political protesters.

Local police departments were given the tools they needed to
restore and maintain order: armored personnel carriers, assault rifles,
submachine guns, flashbang grenades, grenade launchers, sniper rifles, Special
Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams, sophisticated intelligence gathering
equipment which has been coupled with an aggressive style of policing (such as,
stop and frisk, and broken windows) and a series of court decisions designed to
make their job easier but also erode fundamental civil liberties (such as,
exemptions to Miranda and illegal searches, no knock warrants, and seizures of
property).

The police have a strong financial incentive (especially in
cities without lots of property tax paying citizens) to be aggressive. The
desire to militarize themselves means they aggressively seize property and
issue tickets to raise money; and lots of arrests – which proves to policy
makers in Washington that they are being tough on criminal behavior – also means
more dollars and military equipment from a wide range of federal programs.

What we are dealing with is a domestic military force full
of people who see themselves as warriors on the battlefield. Whether they are
good people with good intentions is of no importance. They and their supporters
believe that the police are our last line of defense against a decline into
chaos. They are our Warrior Cops.

With nearly 800,000 people with police type powers in
departments spread across the country with little public or national oversight,
this will not be "fixed" by better training, better police community
relations, or getting rid of a few so-called "bad apples." This is a
systemic problem.